by John Prebble
Black Duncan of the Cowl, seventh Laird of Glenorchy, succeeded Grey Colin in 1583. He drove out the brother whom his father had favoured, and defrauded him of his inheritance. In the following forty-eight years he made himself one of the strongest and most feared men in the Western Highlands. He was a shrewd, swarthy man with short black curls and a square-cut beard à la Henri Quatre. His brow was an angry scowl, his nose thick and brutish, but his eyes sparkled with impish intelligence. He dressed himself in black clothes and rode like a centaur. Though he was a robber baron, cast from the same mould as his ancestors, he kept his windows open to the south and was a great improver and builder, scattering Breadalbane with round towers and solid keeps. The walls of Finlarig Caste, guarding Glen Lochay and Glen Dochart at the western end of Loch Tay, were six feet thick and surrounded by a deep moat. Above its fireplace he put the arms of James VI whom he generously treated as his equal. In the dungeon was a comprehensive collections of chains, heading-axes, racks, screws and branding-irons. Beyond the moat was an oak-tree from which he hanged those common people who offended him. For the removal of men of gentler birth, there was a heading-block and pit.
At Balloch, on the eastern end of Loch Tay, he built another castle, once he had driven the MacGregors from the land. He built a third at Achallader by the mouth of Glen Orchy, and here too he had first to get rid of the owners. They were Fletchers, and so far they had managed to hold their own against the Campbells, but in Black Duncan there was a distillation of all Glenorchy guile. Riding by Achallader one day with his attendants, he ordered an English servant to pasture his horse in a patch of corn above the Fletchers' house. The simple man did as he was told and, having no Gaelic, did not understand when the Fletchers warned him that he would be shot if he did not remove himself and the horse from the corn. So he was shot. Up came Black Duncan then, much concerned by the sight of the dead man and by the fact that the Fletcher laird would lose his own life when the Crown heard of the killing. He advised Fletcher to flee to France, but the man was afraid that his family would still forfeit the property to the King. That, said Black Duncan, was really no problem. He would purchase the land, by a mock deed, of course, and without the tiresome inconvenience of paying for it. When the King's pardon had been secured, he would return it. The laird signed the deed, and the Fletchers never recovered Achallader.
In softer moods, Black Duncan of the Cowl planted fine parks of timber, and some of his chestnuts still stood about Finlarig a hundred years ago. He introduced rabbits and the fallow deer to Perthshire, and he bred fine horses. He frothed in a mad rage for weeks when the MacGregors killed forty of his brood mares, and a stallion that had been given to him by Prince Henry. With Letters of Fire and Sword he drove Clan Gregor out of Breadalbane to the isles of Loch Rannoch, and he had no patience with his cousins, the lairds of Glenlyon, who not only tolerated the MacGregors but occasionally married them.
The Glenorchy chiefs who followed Black Duncan, when he finally and reluctantly died in 1631, were poor figures compared with their ancestors. The eighth, ninth and tenth lairds did little more than spend the money and mortgage the estates their predecessors had spent so much of their own time and others' blood in acquiring. Thus Iain Glas, who was to be the eleventh in line, comes almost as a reassurance. He was born in 1635, and he was five years old when his father succeeded to an empty treasury and emptier lands that were now a sporting-ground for the men of Glencoe and Keppoch. He was ten when the Lochaber Men fought the Campbells on Sron a' Chlachain, and twenty when they ravaged Glen Lyon for the first time. ‘Conquer, and keep things conquered!’ had been the Glenorchy motto since the days of Black Colin the Crusader, but Iain Glas's father had no spirit or strength for anything but marrying one wife after another. Even so, his triumphs here were considerable. He had twenty-seven children. Though most of these customarily and mercifully died before they could involve the Laird in any more expense than the services of a wet-nurse and a leech, those who did survive were a burden on an empty exchequer.
As seems to have been the way with the Glenorchy men, the tenth laird had no love or hope for his first son. And since he had no money either, Iain Glas went to London to make a fortune of his own. He did this as quickly as possible, by marrying, at the age of 22, Lady Mary Rich, the daughter of the first Earl of Holland. ‘I have written several times to your honour,’ he told his indifferent father, who had marital problems of his own, ‘and have had no return concerning my intended marriage, which now by the Lord's blessing I have accomplished.’ A dowry of £10,000 Sterling may have inspired the Laird's blessing too, but nobody thought the match a wise one. This was the Commonwealth, and Lady Mary's first husband had been executed for his loyalty to Charles II. Iain Glas's strongest sense, however, was an uncanny prescience. The King would enjoy his own again, and those who had suffered most under Cromwell might profit best from the Restoration when it came. Until that happy day he took his wife back to Breadalbane. He travelled sensibly, without wasting any of the dowry on coaches and horses. He had two little garrons sent from Loch Tayside, mounted himself and his bride on one, loaded his baggage on the other, and set out thus. At the tail of the ponies trotted two fully armed Highlanders.
Once back in Breadalbane he took the management of the estates out of his father's hands. The Laird complained bitterly, telling his kinsmen that he was King David betrayed by Absalom.
If the Restoration did not bring Iain Glas the prosperity he had hoped from his marriage, his wife solved the difficulty by dying and leaving him free to look elsewhere. But before he chose another, and richer wife, he became a warrior. Far to the north of Scotland the valley of Strathnaver was invaded by twelve hundred men from Caithness, led by a Sinclair of Dunbeath. They burned and robbed and killed without much opposition until the Earl of Caithness, himself a Sinclair and the chief of the clan, asked for the Privy Council's help in subduing his rebellious subject. Iain Glas was now thirty, and had had no experience at all of warfare, but he offered to bring out his father's people and to lead any expedition that might be sent to Sutherland. Satisfied with ‘the ability and fidelity of John Campbell younger of Glenorchy’, the Council agreeably gave him a general's commission without any troublesome insistence that he should rise to it from a lieutenancy. He was also given three hundred men of the King's Guard and some companies of Linlithgow's Regiment of Foot. The campaign was brief and unspectacular, and put no strain on Iain Glas's rudimentary military knowledge. He took Dunbeath Castle without difficulty, the laird having already abandoned it, burnt a few houses, destroyed crops, and drove the rebels into the hills.
Far more important to him than an empty victory at arms was his discovery that the Earl of Caithness was in debt and harried by dunning creditors. Though the bottom of the Glenorchy exchequer was not yet covered, Iain Glas's good management had at least accumulated enough money for a profitable investment. He agreed to pay the childless Earl a life-annuity of £1,000. In return, and upon the Earl's death, he would receive the titles, estates and heritable jurisdictions of the earldom. This one-sided bargain cost him no more than £4,000, for the Earl obligingly quit the world four years later, in 1672. Ian Glas posted in haste to London where he placed the attested conveyance before the King. Charles II was probably amused by the impudent effrontery of the claim, and he amiably approved it, adding a title or two besides. The untitled heir to a Highland laird became Earl of Caithness, Viscount Breadalbane, Lord St Clair of Berridale and Glenorchy, with the right to assume the name and arms of Sinclair. On Loch Tayside, King David was at last filled with joy for the belated success of his erring Absalom.
Eleven months later, Iain Glas married the Earl's widow. She was a Campbell too, a sister of the ninth Earl of Argyll, and by this presumably loveless match he was saved the trouble of paying her the annual allowance that was due from the Caithness estate.
At the age of forty-three Iain Glas now had rank and position to fit the ponderous dignity of his frame and the gravity of his express
ion. The rents of his new lands flowed down to pay the debts that still saddled his father's, to bring the comforts of soft living to Balloch and Finlarig. Or Ghallaibh air bòrd Bhealaich, said the people of Breadalbane; the gold of Caithness is on the table at Balloch. And then, out of Caithness to spoil the pleasure came George Sinclair of Keiss, who not only disputed the Campbell's right to the earldom, but raised an army to secure it for himself. With the grudging permission of the Privy Council, Iain Glas sent the fiery cross about Loch Tay. Seven hundred of those who gathered at Balloch were chosen, only the best and the strongest, only those, it was said, who could leap fully armed across the length of a double plaid. The Earl gave the command of them to his cousin, Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, a spendthrift drinking-man who was already on his way to irresponsible bankruptcy. He marched his fine regiment away to the music of a new air composed by Finlay MacIvor, the Glenlyon piper. It jeered at the Caithness men for their custom of wearing breeches and not the kilt.
Carles of the breeks,
The padded coats and breeks,
It's time you were rising
The bold band from the cold bens
Is marching to Caithness
To put the Northmen in danger.
By Allt-na-Meirleach in Caithness the Campbells and the Sinclairs fought one of the last clan battles of the Highlands, but the bold band from the bens did not rely on their valour alone. They allowed their baggage-train, loaded with whisky, to fall into the hands of the carles with the breeks, and when the Sinclairs were half-sodden with drink the Campbells fell upon them and routed them. When the squalid slaughter was over, Glenlyon quartered his men on Caithness and collected rents and taxes for his chief.
Sinclair of Keiss had escaped from Allt-na-Meirleach, and he took his complaints and claims to Court in London. He was supported by the Privy Council of Scotland, and the King, who was a fair man if occasionally impulsive, annulled the patent of earldom in favour of John Campbell and gave it to Sinclair. But since he saw no sense in losing one friend by enlisting another, he compensated Iain Glas handsomely, making him Earl of Breadalbane and Holland, Viscount of Tay and Paintland, Lord Glenorchie, Benderaloch, Ormelie and Wick in the Peerage of Scotland.
Iain Glas, like most of his ancestors, disliked his first son intensely and saw no reason why the boy should inherit the advantages of so much wit, foresight and brash impudence. He persuaded the King to grant him the right to nominate another of his sons, explaining that Duncan, the first, was feeble-minded and easily deceived through the ‘facility of his nature and the want of knowledge’. But Breadalbane's disgust was not so much with the boy's state of mind as his independence of spirit. Against his father's orders, Duncan had eloped with Marjorie Campbell of Lawers, dressed as a wandering fiddler*
In 1686, when his father died, the Earl became master of Breadalbane in fact as well as name. He was fifty-one, and by hard work and cunning he had removed the galling harness of debt from the estates. Beyond Duncan the eloper, and John the second son who was now his designated heir, he had many other children by both wives, and for the first time in four generations there was money to support the Glenorchy family's vanities and pretensions. Politically, Breadalbane's activities were as yet unequivocal. His splendid titles and privileges had come from the Stuarts, and he served Charles II and James II without question. He had sent fifteen hundred men to join the Highland Host, complaining only that while they were away in the Lowlands his glens had been sorely molested by raiders from Glencoe and Keppoch. He had kept himself and his people out of the ninth Earl of Argyll's rising in 1685, although several years earlier he had put his name to a bond promising upon his honour to help ‘in all things tending to the goodwill and standing of the said Earl's noble and ancient family whereof I am descended’. Equally circumspect, and not wishing to antagonize a clan he hoped one day to lead, he had allowed none of his dependants to join in the Atholl Raid on Argyllshire.
The Revolution was the first great challenge to his loyalties, and he answered it by waiting, ‘living in retirement’ he called it, in his castles on Loch Tay and Loch Awe. He was also afraid. Moments like this were dangerous for a man who was disliked and distrusted by all but his own kinsmen. When Dundee called him to the gathering at Dalcomera he stayed away, pleading an attack of gout, an affliction which providentially immobilized all his people too. Neither did he send swordsmen to help Hugh Mackay. ‘The Government expects no service from me,’ he told his chamberlain, Alexander Campbell of Barcaldine, ‘nor thanks me if I do any. Therefore cause my men preserve themselves and meddle with neither side, as they will be answerable.’ When the Lochaber men savaged Glenlyon and burned Achallader he raged inwardly, remembering MacIain's part with particular and venomous hatred. Yet he was determined to stomach even this humiliation for the moment, and when some of his Glen Orchy tenants made a retaliatory raid on Glencoe, stealing the cattle of a Mary MacDonald from their winter grazing by the Meeting of the Waters, he ordered Barcaldine to pay her £160 Scots in compensation. The MacDonalds' certain astonishment went unrecorded.
In the spring of 1690, Breadalbane emerged from his shell of non-involvement to play his peculiar double-game. To William he presented himself as an honest arbitrator, the only man in the Highlands who could talk and treat with the clans in a language they understood. It was probably at this time that he drew up and submitted to William hisProposals Concerning the Highlanders, a brief but masterly summary of the military strength of the clans and the use which could be made of them by a shrewd monarch. It was the first suggestion* of making the Highlands a reservoir of blood, to be profitably spent in Britain's wars, and during the next century and a half successive Parliaments at Westminster would drain the source until it was exhausted. ‘Your Majesty has these forces without any charge,’ Breadalbane told William, ‘except for a few officers, and that only when employed, and it may be asserted that there cannot be better militiamen than they are. In case Your Majesty, at any time, think it fit to employ a regiment of Highlanders abroad, they may be detached out of this body of men.’ He listed the names of the chiefs who, he thought, could or would contribute men to such a force. Missing from the list were the names of Coll MacDonald of Keppoch and Alasdair MacDonald of Glencoe.
He followed these proposals with pressing requests that he be allowed to treat with the rebel chiefs and bring them to proper allegiance, borrowing what he wished when he wished from Tarbat's scheme. Though he was given a commission to treat, the King's lack of decision, and the chiefs' indifference, meant that little could be done. He made his leisurely journey to Chester in the tail of Scipio Hill. Then came Cromdale and Mackay's march on Inverlochy. Breadalbane felt a chill in the air, and he went home to Loch Tay, to worry about the cutting of timber and the sale of cattle, the damming of water and the frustrating financial problems of his nephew, Robert Campbell of Glenlyon. In September he moved down Glen Orchy to winter in Kilchurn Castle, below the brown shoulder of Ben Cruachan. There he got a letter from the Duke of Hamilton, President of the Privy Council, inviting him to Edinburgh to discuss plans for bringing peace to the Highlands. Surprisingly, after his anxious efforts to be involved in such affairs, he refused to go.
It is a good design, and I pray God it may prosper. I have been, and am, as desirous to have it done as any person, as I am a very great sufferer by the present dissolute conditions. I have had my house of Achallader (which your Grace has seen) burnt to the ground, and one of my vassal's lands totally burnt.
It was necessary now to remind the Lords in Council that, unlike most of them, he had lost men, money and material at the hands of the rebel clans. But this, he knew, was no reason for not answering their call, albeit so peremptory a summons.
My lord, I laid aside thoughts of travelling this winter, not expecting any such call, nor needed it to have had such a vertification, being I live peaceably and legally, and the diet is so short that I have not time to read it, much less be ready for such a journey. But the business proposed
for my coming need not upon that account be delayed; for if the Council be pleased to send their instructions to me, when I receive them I shall go about their commands as diligently as I had them out of your Grace's hands.
But his refusal to leave the secure black walls of Kilchurn had nothing to do with the time of the year, or the shortness of notice. He was afraid to go. He knew that when he reached Edinburgh he would not be invited to sit in Holyroodhouse with the Lords in Council as their adviser, but would be held prisoner in a room below Parliament Hall, or at worst be thrown into the Tolbooth. The darker colour of his double-dealing had been momentarily seen beneath the purity of his allegiance to William. In August, the Earl of Annandale and some others of The Club had been arrested on a charge of plotting to restore James II ‘in a parliamentary way’. The swarthy, handsome Annandale was sent to the Fleet Prison in London, where he made a long confession in a desperate and successful attempt to save his head. He said that members of The Club had met frequently in Breadalbane's Edinburgh lodgings that summer, before the Earl went home to the Highlands, and the wily old Campbell had been seen burning papers that might incriminate him. The Earl of Annandale, said the confession, further remembered that
... Breadalbane kept a constant correspondence with the Highland rebels, and that he hath shown him letters of Buchan, and that the Earl of Breadalbane delivered him a letter from Buchan, telling him he was very glad to hear he had returned to his duty, and advising him to appear in arms to give example to the rest who were well affected.
